NetBSD 2.0 Released

Quique writes "NetBSD 2.0 is the tenth major release of the NetBSD Operating System, and has just been released. It can be downloaded from one of the mirror sites. NetBSD is widely known as the most portable operating system in the world. It currently supports fifty four different system architectures, all from a single source tree, and is always being ported to more. NetBSD 2.0 continues the long tradition with major improvements in file system and memory management performance, major security enhancements, and support for many new platforms and peripherals." The release announcement is also available.

Comments

Re:What are NetBSD's strengths?

[ArbitraryConstant]

"It's just as secure as OpenBSD, not more."

No, it's not.

-a great deal less of the privsep stuff
-no propolice
-no W^X

A number of vulnerabilities common to NetBSD and OpenBSD were mitigated by ProPolice on OpenBSD. That was 1.6... but I didn't see anything about propolice on the 2.0 release page.

"I can't think of anything more secure then OpenBSD at the moment though."

There are special cases where other OSes can be more secure, IMO. For example, on a big system where you have to let people in with permissions to do something interesting, rather than a firewall or a server spewing pages, the FreeBSD jail facility can make it more secure in practical terms.

There's usually a better OpenBSD way to do it, but that way is sometimes enough of a PITA that it doesn'thappen. For example, you can give someone root in a FreeBSD jail and just let them do their thing rather than screwing around with systrace on an OpenBSD machine. Jails are a very blunt tool, but they're very effective.

Apart from localized advantages such as that, OpenBSD is the most secure. I just didn't want anyone to think I was a zealot blind to the advantages of other OSes. :)